Most ads you see are chosen by a reinforcement learning model — here’s how it works

Reinforcement learning models seek to maximize rewards. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Your first goal is to find the ad that generates the most clicks. In advertising lingo, you will want to maximize your click-trhough rate (CTR). The CTR is ratio of clicks over number of ads displayed, also called impressions. When youre dealing with more than two alternatives, it is called A/B/n testing. [Read:How do you build a pet-friendly gadget?...

February 28, 2021 · 4 min · 641 words · Lindsey Moody

Can auditing eliminate bias from algorithms?

The big question ever since: How do we solve this problem? And there is a growing field of private auditing firms that purport to do just that. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Articles inFast Company,VentureBeat, andMIT Technology Reviewcalled out the company for mischaracterizing the audit. [Read:How do you build a pet-friendly gadget? What is algorithmic auditing how does it work? Good question its a pretty undefined field. Companies may also have their own internal auditing teams that look at algorithms before theyre released to the public....

February 27, 2021 · 2 min · 384 words · Joseph Fletcher

Hey millennials, stop ruining emoji for Gen Z

We barely use them anymore, they scoffed. To them, many emojis are like overenthusiastic dance moves at weddings: reserved for awkward millennials. And they use them all wrong anyway, my cohort from generation Z added earnestly. With3,353 charactersavailable and 5 billion sent each day, emojis are now a significant language system. When the emoji database is updated, it usually reflects the needs of the time. This latest update, for instance, features a new vaccine syringe and more same-sex couples....

February 27, 2021 · 2 min · 318 words · Amanda Kaufman

An ode to portable CD players — you were ugly in a beautiful way

Hey,P Hey,P Hey,P Fuck. ? ? ??? This is a professional operation. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. And if youre arent a relic? You know, the sort of thing you look at it and sayhow? For me, the most mesmeric part was being able tochange trackswhile I was listening to a CDoutside. These days, I simply try not to go outside. Now, Ive got no desire to endlessly wax lyrical about portable CD players....

February 26, 2021 · 1 min · 141 words · Carlos Clayton

Brompton Electric review: A tiny folding ebike you’ll take almost everywhere

For another, they tend to weigh 50-70 pounds, making them a pain to manuever whilenotriding them. And good luck going up mild inclines if your battery runs out. For all the conveniences of ebikes, they rarely come without significant caveats. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. But rather, its to highlight just how awesome theBrompton Electricis. Ive ridden several folding bikes before, but none that fold down nearly as compact....

February 26, 2021 · 2 min · 311 words · Bryan Flynn

The ins and outs of JavaScript reducer — a simple, yet powerful array method

JavaScriptsreduceis one of the most useful array methods that should be in a developers arsenal. Its a cleaner way of iterating over and processing the data stored in an array. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Lets get started then! The reducer function takes four arguments:accumulator,currentValue,currentIndex, andarray. How does thereducemethod achieve it using these parameters? The value returned by the reducer function is assigned to theaccumulatorvariable. In each iteration through the array items, the accumulators value is updated to the returned result....

February 26, 2021 · 2 min · 385 words · Amanda Norman

Just how big are Elon Musk and Bill Gates’ carbon footprints? You might be surprised

Altogether, the worlds billionairessaw their wealth surgeover $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes. Those are astronomical numbers, and its hard to get ones head around them without some context. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. CC BY-NC-ND To pick a sample of billionaires, we started with the 2020Forbes Listof 2,095 billionaires. This excluded most of the superrich inAsia and the Middle East. We combed 82 databases of public records to document billionaires houses, vehicles, aircraft, and yachts....

February 25, 2021 · 2 min · 261 words · Darren Nichols

Robot artist gets its first major exhibition — but is it truly creative?

A robot artist called Ai-Da will get its first major exhibition at Londons Design Museum this summer. But is the humanoid truly creative? Ai-Das works are based on photos taken by cameras in the droids eyes. Algorithms then transform the images into a set of coordinates, which guide the robots drawing hand. Ai-Das co-inventor, Aiden Meller, describes Ai-Das fragmented style as shattered. We didnt want tight representational photographic images, even though we could have programmed it to do that....

February 25, 2021 · 2 min · 392 words · Alicia Fletcher

If God broke the laws of physics, would scientists even notice?

I was in lockdown when I received this question and was instantly intrigued. To tackle the question, lets break it down a bit. First, can God travel faster than light? Lets just take the question at face value. Light travels at an approximate speed of 3 x 105kilometers every second, or 186,000 miles per second. 40% off TNW Conference! A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyonstraveled above light speed....

February 24, 2021 · 3 min · 461 words · Gary Anderson

3 things that make the Hyundai Ioniq 5 a great EV

Today, South Korean carmaker Hyundai unveiled its new hatchback EV, the 5. And you know what, it looks like a bloody brilliant. But before we get to that, heres a picture (lucky you) and quick overview. Hyundais 5 is the companys firstEVthats part of its new electric-focused Ioniq brand. With that in mind, the 5 lays down the foundation of whats to come for Ioniqs electric future. It’s free, every week, in your inbox....

February 23, 2021 · 2 min · 296 words · Erica Hunt

How to turn your dog’s nap time into a regularized linear model

While a model that generates predictions that arent too far off from the true value has low variance. Since its already going beyond the real patterns of the data, the model isoverfittingthe data. This is where regularization comes in! In practice, regularization tunes the values of the coefficients. Thats why regularization techniques are also calledshrinkagetechniques. Regularization techniques are also calledshrinkage techniques, because they shrink the value of the coefficients. Some coefficients can be shrunk to zero....

February 23, 2021 · 4 min · 660 words · Nicholas Barr

This Harvard professor claims an alien spaceship visited us in 2017

A highly unusual objectwas spottedtraveling through the solar system in 2017. It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens. Nearly all scientists believe that Oumuamua probably originates from outside the solar system. But how feasible is this? And how come most scientists disagree with the claim? So it makes sense that Oumuamua could be one of these. Wespotted another last year Borisov which suggests they are as common as we predict....

February 23, 2021 · 2 min · 323 words · Sabrina Barnes

We all want EVs that charge in 5 minutes, but don’t bet on it

EVs are super fast, ultra quiet, and brilliantly futuristic. They are what MP3 is to vinyl, an all-round much better idea for the everyday. But that seems to be changing. Naturally, my attention was grabbed, it sounds too good to be true. I had to look deeper. I asked an industry expert to get their take on the situation and find out whats going on. It’s free, every week, in your inbox....

February 23, 2021 · 2 min · 397 words · Edward Miller